A week with a human monster!

Thirty years ago Sandy Fawkes was a Daily Express reporter following a story in the southern states of the USA. She met a good-looking young man in a bar, and spent the next six days in his company, driving around with him, eating out, and sharing a bed. He was enigmatic and monosyllabic, but sufficiently intriguing to keep her interest alive. Just as well, for had he been bored he might well have murdered her. She later discovered that he had been responsible for the hideous deaths of at least 18 people, the last four within the two days immediately before he picked her up. She had been intimate with wickedness, and the realisation frightened her.

This was a better story than any she had been sent to cover, so she naturally wrote it up in a book she called Killing Time. The book under review is essentially a reprint, with an additional six pages of postscript and a new, tendentious title. The faults of the original are still there, and we might as well despatch them at once. The pages are stuffed with clichés so hoary as to make one cringe, and the descriptions of sexual performance with her friend are lewd, coarse, adolescent, fit only for pub-talk. If you can stumble through these blocks, however, and as long as you do not nurse expectations of profundity, you are likely to find this tale sufficiently gripping to forgive the railway its latest delay.

The first half of the book, told neatly in the third person, portrays the man she knew before she knew the man. He was attentive and courteous, placing his jacket on her shoulders to protect her from the chill of the evening, rushing to assuage her pain when she accidentally burnt her fingers, taking time and care to rescue a hawk-moth.